passion
2. I.e., the acorn-shaped button on the end of the blind cord.
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A SKETCH OF THE PAST / 2157
flowers growing on the wall; they were great starry blossoms, with purple streaks, and large green buds, part empty, part full.
If I were a painter I should paint these first impressions in pale yellow, silver, and green. There was the pale yellow blind; the green sea; and the silver of the passion flowers. I should make a picture that was globular; semitransparent. I should make a picture of curved petals; of shells; of things that were semi-transparent; I should make curved shapes, showing the light through, but not giving a clear outline. Everything would be large and dim; and what was seen would at the same time be heard; sounds would come through this petal or leaf?sounds indistinguishable from sights. Sound and sight seem to make equal parts of these first impressions. When I think of the early morning in bed I also hear the caw of rooks3 falling from a great height. The sound seems to fall through an elastic, gummy air; which holds it up; which prevents it from being sharp and distinct. The quality of the air above Talland House seemed to suspend sound, to let it sink down slowly, as if it were caught in a blue gummy veil. The rooks cawing is part of the waves breaking?one, two, one, two?and the splash as the wave drew back and then it gathered again, and I lay there half awake, half asleep, drawing in such ecstasy as I cannot describe.
The next memory?all these colour-and-sound memories hang together at St Ives?was much more robust; it was highly sensual. It was later. It still makes me feel warm; as if everything were ripe; humming; sunny; smelling so many smells at once; and all making a whole that even now makes me stop?as I stopped then going down to the beach; I stopped at the top to look down at the gardens. They were sunk beneath the road. The apples were on a level with one's head. The gardens gave off a murmur of bees; the apples were red and gold; there were also pink flowers; and grey and silver leaves. The buzz, the croon, the smell, all seemed to press voluptuously against some membrane; not to burst it; but to hum round one such a complete rapture of pleasure that I stopped, smelt; looked. But again I cannot describe that rapture. It was rapture rather than ecstasy.
The strength of these pictures?but sight was always then so much mixed with sound that picture is not the right word?the strength anyhow of these impressions makes me again digress. Those moments?in the nursery, on the road to the beach?can still be more real than the present moment. This I have just tested. For I got up and crossed the garden. Percy was digging the asparagus bed; Louie4 was shaking a mat in front of the bedroom door. But I was seeing them through the sight I saw here?the nursery and the road to the beach. At times I can go back to St Ives more completely than I can this morning. I can reach a state where I seem to be watching things happen as if I were there. That is, I suppose, that my memory supplies what I had forgotten, so that it seems as if it were happening independently, though I am really making it happen. In certain favourable moods, memories?what one has forgotten? come to the top. Now if this is so, is it not possible?I often wonder? that things we have felt with great intensity have an existence independent of our minds; are in fact still in existence? And if so, will it not be possible, in time, that some device will be invented by which we can tap them? I see it?the past?as an avenue lying behind; a long ribbon of scenes, emotions. There at
3. Black crows. Monks House, the Woolfs' country home in Rod4. The gardener and 'daily help,' respectively, at mell, Sussex.
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2 215 8 / VIRGINIA WOOLF
the end of the avenue still, are the garden and the nursery. Instead of remembering here a scene and there a sound, I shall fit a plug into the wall;' and listen in to the past. I shall turn up August 1890. I feel that strong emotion must leave its trace; and it is only a question of discovering how we can get ourselves again attached to it, so that we shall be able to live our lives through from the start.
But the peculiarity of these two strong memories is that each was very simple. I am hardly aware of myself, but only of the sensation. I am only the container of the feeling of ecstasy, of the feeling of rapture. Perhaps this is characteristic of all childhood memories; perhaps it accounts for their strength. Later we add to feelings much that makes them more complex; and therefore less strong; or if not less strong, less isolated, less complete. But instead of analysing this, here is an instance of what I mean?my feeling about the looking-glass in the hall.
There was a small looking-glass in the hall at Talland House. It had, I remember, a ledge with a brush on it. By standing on tiptoe I could see my face in the glass. When I was six or seven perhaps, I got into the habit of looking at my face in the glass. But 1 only did this if I was sure that I was alone. I was ashamed of it. A strong feeling of guilt seemed naturally attached to it. But why was this so? One obvious reason occurs to me?Vanessa and I were both what was called tomboys; that is, we played cricket, scrambled over rocks, climbed trees, were said not to care for clothes and so on. Perhaps therefore to have been found looking in the glass would have been against our tomboy code. But I think that my feeling of shame went a great deal deeper. I am almost inclined to drag in my grandfather?Sir James, who once smoked a cigar, liked it, and so threw away his cigar and never smoked another. I am almost inclined to think that I inherited a streak of the puritan, of the Clapham Sect.6 At any rate, the looking-glass shame has lasted all my life, long after the tomboy phase was over. I cannot now powder my nose in public. Everything to do with dress?to be fitted, to come into a room wearing a new dress?still frightens me; at least makes me shy, self-conscious, uncomfortable. 'Oh to be able to run, like Julian Morrell,7 all over the garden in a new dress', I thought not many years ago at Garsington; when Julian undid a parcel and put on a new dress and scampered round and round like a hare. Yet femininity was very strong in our family. We were famous for our beauty?my mother's beauty, Stella's beauty, gave me as early as I can remember, pride and pleasure. What then gave me this feeling of shame, unless it were that I inherited some opposite instinct? My father was spartan, ascetic, puritanical. He had 1 think no feeling for pictures; no ear for music; no sense of the sound of words. This leads me to think that my?I would say 'our' if I knew enough about Vanessa, Thoby and Adrian8?but how little we know even about brothers and sisters? this leads me to think that my natural love for beauty was checked by some ancestral dread. Yet this did not prevent me from feeling ecstasies and raptures spontaneously and intensely and without any shame or the least sense of guilt, so long as they were disconnected with my own body. I thus detect another
5. I.e., as if plugging in a radio. 19th century, was instrumental in bringing about 6. In marrying Jane Catherine Venn, Woolf's the abolition of the slave trade. grandfather, James Stephen, had allied himself 7. Daughter of Philip [Vlorrell, member of Parliawith the heart of the so-called Clapham sect. John ment, and his wife, Ottoline, the celebrated literary and Henry Venn, respectively rector and curate of hostess. Garsington Manor was their house in Clapham in south London, were prominent mem-Oxfordshire. bers of this evangelical society, which, in the early 8. Woolf's brothers and sister.
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A SKETCH OF THE PAST / 2159
element in the shame which 1 had in being caught looking at myself in the glass in the hall. I must have been ashamed or afraid of my own body. Another memory, also of the hall, may help to explain this. There was a slab
